Scott Brown Takes a Pill

Up until yesterday, and to his credit, Senator Scott Brown had made very few mistakes in handling the formidable challenge being brought by Elizabeth Warren in the race for his Senate seat in Massachusetts. Senator McDreamy got Warren to agree to a "pact" on outside money. He got a nice comparative story the other day in The Boston Globe — which always has had a secret, guilty liberal crush on him — about how he's raised most of his money from inside the Commonwealth, thereby affixing in the public mind the notion of Warren as a parachute candidate bankrolled by outside dough. Dave Weigel even tweeted that he'd caught Brown applauding briefly on camera during the president's State Of The Union address. He's still behind, but the race is still tight enough to produce at least 250 strange Texas euphemisms from Dan Rather. And then, a few days ago, for no apparent reason, Scott Brown decided it was time to step on his own dick.

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He signed on with the radical bill proposed by Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri that would allow any employeror insurer to opt out of any health-care services that the federal law otherwise required that they cover. All they need to do is gin up a "moral objection" to providing the treatment. (Maybe they have moral qualms about how much the procedure costs. It's fairly obvious that Blunt's objective is to gut a huge part of the Affordable Care Act, to repeal it from the inside out.) By signing onto this, Brown not only engaged the active opposition of the huge and influential medical and medical research communities in Massachusetts, but also he enraged Warren's formidable Democratic base, as well as alienating independents of both parties and both sexes. He threw himself onto the losing side of a culture war debate that he cannot want to have in Massachusetts. Both Yvonne Abrahamin the Globeand Margery Eagan in the conservative Boston Herald teed him up this morning. But that was nothing compared to the complete fool Brown made of himself on television while trying to explain what he'd done to my pal, Jim Braude. Watch the video. That's not a deer-in-the-headlights moment. That's a deer-as-a-lump-in-the-ditch moment.

The only possible explanation is that Scott Brown doesn't have the vaguest idea what in the hell he's supporting in the middle of this ginned-up, but genuinely explosive, controversy. I think he probably just signed on because, occasionally, he has to remind the Republican base that he's a Republican. He plainly didn't read the statute. The one nagging problem Brown always has had is that he's basically a state legislator who won a fluke of an election and is now fighting well above his weight class. He'd largely put that behind him. Not any more.

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